"Corbucci's heroes can't really be called heroes. In another director's western, they would be the bad guys. And as time went on, Corbucci kept de-emphasizing the role of the hero ... In Il Grande Silenzio, he has Klaus Kinski playing a villainous bounty hunter. I'm not a big fan of Kinski, but he's amazing in this movie — it's definitely his best performance in a genre movie. The hero of Il Grande Silenzio is Jean-Louis Trintignant, playing a mute. By taking his hero’s voice away, Corbucci reduces him to nothing. And Il Grande Silenzio has one of the most nihilistic endings of any western. Trintignant goes out to face the bad guys — and gets killed. The bad guys win, they murder everybody else in the town, they ride away and that's the end of the movie. It's shocking to this day. A movie like (Andre de Toth's) Day of the Outlaw, as famous as it is for being bleak and gritty, is practically a musical in comparison to Il Grande Silenzio. Silenzio takes place in the snow — I liked the action in the snow so much, Django Unchained has a big snow section in the middle of the movie."